Aidona Treasure Displayed at Last Near Where it was Found

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Last week hundreds of residents from the tiny hilltop town of Aidone in eastern Sicily visited the town’s archaeology museum to celebrate the return of an ancient treasure that had been illegally whisked away from them thirty years ago. The cache of 16 Hellenistic silver-gilt objects (originally used for religious purposes and for banquets and dating from the third century B.C. ) had been illegally excavated in Morgantina, an ancient Greek settlement whose ruins lie next to Aidone. The objects, now known as the Morgantina silver, had been acquired on the antiquities market by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in two installments, in 1981 and 1982, for a total of $2.74 million from dealer Robert Hecht. It has taken all that time for archaeologists, magistrates and eventually the Italian government to convince the museum that the pieces should be returned.

This was achieved in a 2006 accord between Italy and the museum for the return of several objects that Italians had demonstrated had been looted from Italian soil. This recognises that the Met shares joint custody of the silver, which will travel between New York and Aidone every four years for exhibit, it will temporarily return to New York in 2014. When the silver came to Italy in February, the Met received a recently excavated 20-piece Roman dining set from the Pompeii region.

After being exhibited in other Italian towns and the Shanghai World Expo this year after it arrived back in the country in February, the hoard has now arrived in Sicily, and installed in the local museum with other finds found in the house where it seems the silver was probably buried in 211 B.C. when Morgantina fell to the Romans.

For decades Dr. Malcolm Bell III, professor emeritus of art history and archaeology at the University of Virginia and the director of excavations at Morgantina was a leading crusader for the return of the treasure, and in Aidone, where his excavations brought seasonal work for many residents, he is very much a hero.

“This is a very happy moment and deeply satisfying,” he said in an interview. [...] “The silver can perhaps shed light on the brutal, dramatic circumstances of the final years of the Second Punic War and, seen within the framework of the house, we get a sense of the art and the material culture of Hellenistic Sicily,”[...] “The [objects] have truly been recontextualized, and that is really important.” [...] The Aidone museum is small, without space for temporary exhibitions or multimedia stations, and roads to the town badly need repairs, said Enrico Caruso, who in September was appointed director of the new Archaeological Park of Morgantina. But all of its treasures belong in Aidone, he said, adding, “Here they are not orphans.”

Local residents are pleased that at last those who bought the items taken from them have been persuaded to return them.

“They’re beautiful works of art, they tempted a lot of people, but it’s right that they’ve come back to their proper home,” said one visitor, Alfredo Scivoli, who opened a bed-and-breakfast here in April, in anticipation of the tourists that local officials hope will be drawn here by the silver.

The New York Times article notes that for Aidone,"the silver’s return means much more than righting a wrong" and celebrating the power of place of the region where the items were found. The exhibition of the Morgantina treasure near the place it was found presents new hope for the future and is a concrete example that the damage done by looting and the illicit trade is not only archaeological, but economic. Aidone is an economically depressed town that offers few employment opportunities and has seen droves of younger people seek their fortunes elsewhere and the archaeological heritage of the region is an important way of boosting revenues through cultural tourism, a process which the looting of sites and the uncontrolled illegal export of antiquities of all types prevents.

Last year the Aidone Archaeological Museum became the permanent home to two archaic acroliths (statues usually made with wooden trunks but stone heads and extremities) that had also been looted from Morgantina. They had once been owned by Maurice Tempelsman, a New York businessman. [...] Another boost to the collection will come next year when the J. Paul Getty Museum [...] returns a cult statue of a goddess that it bought in 1988 for $18 million. It too was probably looted from Morgantina. [...] In return Sicily will loan several works to the Getty. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Mayor Filippo Gangi of Aidone. The “extraordinary triptych” of artworks, he said, could “trigger an unprecedented economic development” in Aidone, exploiting too the town’s proximity to the Roman Villa del Casale, which boasts more than 4,200 square yards of late Roman mosaics and is already one of the most visited sites in Sicily.

Source: Elisabetta Povoledo, 'A Trove of Ancient Silver Said to Be Stolen Returns to Its Home in Sicily' New York Times December 5, 2010.

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3D Metal Detected Goodies Flying through the Air in Oxfordshire

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Museum objects "go 3D digital" trumpets the UK's Culture24 website:

Visitors can watch spearheads from 1150BC and a 2,000-year-old stash of gold coins fly through the air in a 3D video display after technological whizzes shot close-up sequences of The Oxfordshire Museum’s collection of ancient artefacts and toyed with their backgrounds to superimpose the locations where they were originally found. Gold and enamel finger-rings and the nine-piece Grove hoard [...] have been repositioned against digital backgrounds, manipulated and rotated in a project by Rob Munday. “The brief was to produce an exciting and captivating display which held the attention and enabled the wonderful craftsmanship and detail of the objects to be fully appreciated,” explains Munday [...] Curator Cherry Gray said the innovation would allow the museum to highlight every nick and pattern of the precious display. “New technology has created exciting ways to bring objects to life, and for us to effortlessly enjoy the detail of tiny objects which would otherwise be missed,” she added.

So what are museums for? Are they places where the objects become a mere ancillary to (the source of) hi-tech multimedia displays? Of course the point is that since the latter can be widely disseminated, if that is how the past is to be "experienced" in the future, why have people coming to museums at all? Presumably I can get the 3d image of the whole Grove Hoard on a DVD to enjoy, make fly through the air in my living room. So why then can portable antiquity collectors not collect these? If these images allow the "wonderful craftsmanship and detail of the objects to be fully appreciated" and allow the highlighting of "every nick and pattern" of the subject?

What disturbs me however is that almost certainly every single object chosen for that hi-tech display was a metal detector find ("Highlights of the 3D special: Medieval brooches found in Radley and Cholsey, Two post-Medieval dress hooks which were discovered in Woodstock, Roman coins unearthed in Shellingford, A post-Medieval cosmetic set from West Hagbourne"). Once again the uncritical "unsung heroes of the heritage" model of artefact hunting and collecting gets another public boost.

A few days ago in discussing detectorists' excitement about "the depth advantage" I pointed out the scarring of the spectacular hilltop above Corfe Castle by metal detectorists slicing up the turf looking for collectable goodies below. I had a comment from a metal detectorist yesterday who said "I have a protective love of our countryside and if I thought I was damaging it in any way I would cease this hobby forthwith". Part of the charm of the English countryside is that it is rich with traces and signs of the history of those who inhabited and used it before us. This "power of place" is a value we should surely cherish and be protecting, not use it all up selfishly. Quite obviously artefact hunting is scarring and defacing the archaeological record which is an integral part of that history (this of course is not a quality restricted to the British countryside). Removing the object from that place removes part of the story of that place, irreparably damaging the "power of place" of that site to tell its story. It is therefore interesting to see that by using virtual media to represent the display of the object "in" the setting of the place where it was found, this exhibit emphasises the link between the isolated object and the landscape (and therefore archaeological) context from which it was removed. I bet though that the exhibit does not go that one step further and make the point that hoiking collectable geegaws out of those contexts for personal entertainment and profit should be discouraged (I'd be only too happy to be corrected on that).

Culture 24: 'Medieval treasures get 3D exposure as Oxfordshire Museum goes digital on collection', 28 October 2010.

Photo: A 3D anaglyph picture of a Shoe buckle (1650-1750) from The Oxfordshire Museum, which the public can now view in 3D on 24 inch tv screens using a pair of red-cyan anaglph glasses (24Culture, courtesy of technology company Holovision)

The Welsh Rosetta Stone? "Y Gymuned Ffyliaid Ebrill" and Repatriation

Just to show that it is not just third world "source countries" which may be accused of "cultural property nationalism" David Gill ("Call for Bluestones to return to Pembrokeshire") draws attention to a breaking news story that seems analagous to the controversy currently being whipped up over the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Marbles, activists from the aptly-named "Y Gymuned Ffyliaid Ebrill" has called for the symbolic return of one of the bluestones from Salisbury Plain and is sending a delegate to the upcoming Cairo conference on the restitution of cultural property removed from its country of origin. Meanwhile a group of Dolmen enthusiasts is opposing the move and argues that now the stones are removed from their original context, they should stay in their new home where they can be appreciated in the context of the other elements gathered together at this spot in the past. It is this new assemblage which, they argue, is important - rather than the place from which the objects were removed. This story seems worth watching for the drama played out within what is still a United Kingdom may well give insights into the battle over the movement of cultural property across national borders about which there is so much ongoing debate these days. Thanks David for bringing our attention to this weighty (pun intended) issue.

Sun in the eyes

Out here in Egypt it is part of my job to drive the mission jeep into the valley and pick up the local site foreman (rais) and the Antiquities Council inspector who watches over us and get them on site for the beginning of work, just after dawn. Every day on my way into (the old) New Qurna whichs east of the West Bank temples, for the past couple of weeks I've been getting the glare of the low rising sun in my eyes. The long straight road through the fields runs straight towards it for several kilometres. Being dazzled by the sun is not great fun at the best of times, but given that donkeys, sheep, pedestrians and the odd policeman tend to wander all over the road and tend to be diffiult to see in the glare, driving along that road is not the start of the working day I would choose for myself...

But the reason why that road does that is quite interesting. It turns off the route along the edge of the desert through the now vanished temple of Amenhotep III (that's the one that had the famous "Colossi of Memnon" outside). It runs along (or just inside depending on what reconstruction of the excavated evidence you believe in) the southern wall of the enclosure around the building, which was of course aligned on the rising sun. The alignment of the 3000-year old temple defines the aligmnment of the road leading down to the Nile crossing.

The pro-collecting lobbyists so often attempt to deny the right of the modern citizens of the "source countries" of the artefacts they covet to regard them, and the sites they come from, as part of their heritage. They argue that the populations which live now in countries such as Turkey and Egypt are culturally and genetically alien to the cultures and ethnicities of the creators of the objects they want to acquire without any concern about where they came from and how they came onto the market. After all even metal setected Roman finds from Britain cannot in any way be regarded as the cultural heritage of the British because "the Romans left Britain, didn't they?".

But they forget about the "power of place" the ability of one's own "small homeland" to be a feature of identity and pride. Here on the road to Qurna crammed with tourist buses (yes, even at dawn - they've driven across the desert all night from the Red Sea resorts) the grain of the landscape was created by the influence of the work of Amenhotep III's architects. The temple has all but gone but the people of Qurna still live their lives in its virtual shadow, in more ways than one. The temple of Amenhotep III is a feature that contributes to the definition of where they live. Contributing to the creation of a "place", a function many ancient sites and historic biuldings and landscapes fulfill all over the world (except perhaps Antartica and Wisconsin).

In my blog, I mentioned the trip to Abydos and Beit Khalaff the other day. The road map was pretty hopeless and we ended up going from village to village asking likely looking villagers and getting varying estimates of 'how far" away it was... The last guy we asked gave a blank look.. and then his eyes lit up "you want to go to the tomb of Djoser"? Now actually the tomb was not of Djoser (the builder of the step pyramid at Sakkara), but obviously local pride had endowed this somewhat imposing monument with a properly imposing identification as that of a real historical personage. This site is well off the normal tourist trail, and the villager's pride that a group of white guys had driven all the way from Deir El Bahari to come and see the local ancient monument was obvious.

Collectors and dealers all too easily assume that all the people living in the countries whose decontxtualised archaeological evidence they buy and sell feel no connection at all with the past of the regions they inhabit, that the past of their own land for them is as much a "foreign country" as it is for US and western European collectors. This seems an over-reaching and insulting assumption. It would be a risky assumption that it is only an anathema for archaeologists to have the sites and landmarks of the "source countries" of coveted collectables dug over and ransacked as a source of saleable, leaving only a devastation of holes and a litter of discarded (non-commercially viable) artefacts all over the place.